When scaled to its market size, the Nationalist Party ranks as the second-largest political party in Europe. Not good enough. That’s how Maltese politics operate. Only the very biggest wins here in this Glengarry Glen Ross-style political boiler room. First place earns the Cadillac. Second place gets a set of steak knives. The rest are shown the door.
To be the largest political party in Europe on a per capita basis, you need to be the most inclusive. The more ideologically distinctive you are, the more likely you are to lose just enough support to slip into second place. That does not mean the PN has never positioned itself on the political spectrum. It means that any success it has ever had has always been fragile and often counterintuitive.
In 1977, the PN must have felt it could never beat Labour. Labour’s policies had widespread appeal. Its willingness to exploit incumbency to secure the loyalty of beneficiaries of public largesse was limitless. The image of Dom Mintoff as a formidable leader seemed invincible. The PN lost two consecutive elections to Labour and nothing appeared capable of changing its increasingly bleak prospects.
That year, the PN not only changed its leader but also shifted its political stance, becoming a counterbalance to Mintoff, the dominant figure. How do you positively compare yourself with a driven cult leader whose primary asset is charisma? How do you oppose a strongman? The PN realised that, in the authoritarian climate of the time, they needed to outflank the ruling party to its left rather than its right.
In that context, the PN evolved into the mass party that opposed tyranny. They adopted a creole that combined the discourse of secular Christian Democracy from Italy with the alliance between the intelligentsia and the underground labour movement in Eastern Europe. The PN succeeded in showing up Labour for the thuggish, corrupt and greedy elite it was. It became the real workers’ party.
The shift inspired a generation. The Labour government’s policies of high tariffs and import substitution – what we’d now call Trumpism – were no longer viewed as proletarian in motivation. The PN revealed those methods as tools of a corrupt regime designed to benefit an elite of party funders and ministerial allies. The PN was internationalist and encouraged people to dare to imagine Malta’s integration into Europe. In contrast, Labour was immersed in a faux nostalgic reverie, chained to an imaginary golden age recalled by Ġensna singers in slacks clambering over the stones of Ħaġar Qim.
It’s rarely appealing to suggest a political strategy based on the ideas of previous generations. But let’s see what the current situation is, shall we?
The Labour Party’s hegemony appears and feels unbeatable. Ideologically, it is so far right-wing that it might as well start wearing black shirts to take the kids to the playing field. Yes, there are the cynically tactical initiatives that are more aimed at exhausting the opposition because of its tendency to go into convulsions during confessional crises of conscience than at delivering any real public benefit.
But, otherwise, the Labour Party governs a political and economic system that has increased economic inequality, left a growing segment of the population in poverty and depends on a marginalised underclass of imported labour completely deprived of rights or dignity, let alone union protection and social security.
Labour’s regime is racist, elitist and institutionally corrupt. It also depends on the personal charisma of a body-building, square-jawed, enlightened despot.
At the sight of public disgruntlement, the government scapegoats black and brown people, handcuffs them and forces them onto planes to the delight of cameras, or forces them at gunpoint to the Libyan shore to the delight of xenophobes everywhere.
Just because the Labour government appears populist in its approach does not mean it isn’t elitist. Although it claims to serve a broad majority, its decisions mainly benefit an oligarchy of donors who are ravenously consuming the country’s land and skyline and are preparing to drain the sea and pockmark it with concrete island paradises.
No one believes the Labour leadership has any integrity and Labour is fine with that. It has managed to persuade the country that it is entirely greedy and corrupt, and most of us have given up on hoping to be led by better, kinder or more honest leaders.
A leadership election within an opposition party offers an opportunity for an alternative government to reassess its political stance at a national level. It remains early days and we can only evaluate the campaigns of the leadership candidates weeks or months from now. So far, we have heard no meaningful political debate – no discussions about the candidates’ motivations and aspirations for the country. They have only spoken of their goal to win the leadership race and the party’s aim to form a government.
We have also heard urgent calls for unanimity. It is a tendency among those with weak arguments to seek the final say by silencing others. They seem to want a party with no debate or dialectic, in other words, a cult or, perhaps more accurately, to be more like Labour.
After 25 years in government, the Nationalists were accused of having a delusional sense that they had some divine right to govern. I never thought that was fair then. It is now a more valid criticism. PN leaders appear to expect to be entitled to replace Labour in government simply because they are not Labour. There doesn’t seem to be any effort to articulate a vision, a programme and a plan.
If anything, the tendency seems to be to admire Labour’s winning formula and to try to defeat it by being more like it, perhaps chasing it and overtaking into a blind, unkind race to the right.
Why are PN leaders in politics? Is it to promote a fairer society that fights poverty, not the poor? Is it to protect the environment and reverse its deterioration to preserve it for future generations? Is it to ensure that everyone here can assert and enjoy a decent life, regardless of where they were born or the colour of their skin? Is it to abolish clientelism and favouritism, and prioritise the inclusion of the many over the greed of the few?
Or are those ambitions now considered too Christian, too left-wing, too decent, too “woke”, as some have called it, for an opposition that has embraced the decades-long and entirely self-serving Labour Party mantra that the PN must learn nothing from the decades when it actually won elections?
After 12 years in the wilderness, when will the politics start?
